Wednesday, October 16, 2013

What to do With All Those Timeless Coins?

Anyone that has been on the timeless island stalking rares, doing the daily for reputation or grinding it, or the weekly for epoch stones and 200 valor can tell you that they are getting flooded with timeless coins. If you were on an alt or were a non raider this is a good thing. You can spend 50,000 coins for a burden if you have not had luck with drops and use it to make a 535 piece. Maybe if you get lucky you might even get two stats on that 535 piece.

But what if you are the type of player that there is nothing you can get from the burdens? If you are a raider, even only casual, you might not need more than a few 535 pieces at best. If you are one of those people lucky with drops or someone that raids a little more, there is absolutely no need for a 535 piece at all.

For my alts I can use 535 pieces, they would be a nice upgrade and in some cases even the single stat ones would be a huge upgrade. Heck, on a few of my characters I am even happy when I see 522 PvP gear off my weekly celestial kill for them. But for my main all I needed was a ring with a burden and I've used 9 burdens on rings and still have not received one with critical and haste. I could use my surplus of coins for burdens and try again, but it is not really worth it. Sooner or later running flex and normal each week I will get a better ring.

So what is a main that does not need burdens and has 320,000 timeless coins even after spending 100,000 on the mount to do? Lets face it, alts that are really in need of the gear will not be grinding coins in that manner. Only an over geared main will have that many coins and that is exactly the character that does not need those coins.

So what are you to do with all those timeless coins?

I have two answers to that, one being a suggestion to blizzard for what I believe would be a nice change and the other is what you can do with all those coins now.

What Blizzard Should Do:

Burdens that are purchased with timeless coins should be BoA so you can mail them to alts. The burdens you get from drops and quests can remain soulbound but the ones that you can buy should be bind on account so you can send them to your own characters that might actually have a use for them.

While my hunter has absolutely no use what so ever for timeless coins or burdens he could currently purchase 6 of them that an alt would be able to put to great use. They allowed our mains to get to the island first and collect 496 pieces to send to our alts so why not allow our mains to do the grinding and buy burdens to send to those very same alts?

It is not like collecting 50,000 coins comes all that easy to begin with. It still takes a fair deal of work and effort. Since the island opened I have been on my hunter ever day grinding reputation, chasing down rares, doing the daily and weekly quest, basically killing everything that got in my way. There have been countless hours spent there and lots of death dealt to the creatures on the island and still in all that time I have only amassed close to 450,000 coins. Even if I had not wasted 100,000 on the mount and wasted some other coins here and there that would mean I could only buy 9 burdens.

That would be 9 burdens from working my ass off grinding coins over the course of a month. Now that I am exalted and not really spending a lot of time on the island I will not be grinding out coins like I had been. I only go kill some rares here and there now. This means I will no longer be amassing huge amounts of coins like I had been.

So 9 burdens would be where it ends, maybe 10, in time. Unless I decide to put more time and effort into it. So would it really be a bad thing if I used my main to buy some burdens for my alts to help gear them faster? To get them a little better gear so they feel more comfortable on the island themselves? To make me want to play them more as I see their power increase? To get them slightly better gear without having to do the LFR but be more capable of contributing in a flex than I would be with 496 gear.

Why would it be so bad for the burdens we purchase with coins to be BoA? And more importantly, why were they not released that way to begin with?

If blizzard wanted to increase the life span of the island, letting the characters that are done with it, like my main, basically pass along their burdens they do not need that they can get with all those excesses coins to an alt to make it stronger so it is more fun to run around the island with would do exactly that.

Hey blizzard, not asking for all burdens to be BoA, just the ones you can purchase with coins. How about doing it, or at least giving us one good reason why you won't?

What You Can Do:

Being blizzard will not change how burdens work so they will never become BoA until it is old content, if their track record shows anything, we need to figure out something else to do with those timeless coins and I have already figured it out. I've been using those coins for weeks. You might have too and did not even realize.

The extra roll coins for the ToT raid are 1000 coins each. The ToT raids are now a lot faster and easier with so many people so over geared (warning: you can still get bad groups, it is not always great, just better than it was when current) so you can use those ToT runs as a way to valor cap faster if you want to and use the coins to get extra items even if you just vendor them.

In essence, you are changing timeless coins into gold by using them to roll in the ToT raid. If you only win gold, cool, now your timeless coins are now gold. If you win an item, cool, sell it for gold. You are basically turning your timeless coins into runes and then into gold.

But wait, there is more. If you happen to be an enchanter you can disenchant all those items for sha crystals. And with the increased drop rate of those older raids if you do a full clear with a full set of coins it would not be unheard of to leave the week with 15+ sha crystals.

Even with the crystal market dropping like a rock, thanks to the giveaway 496 items that disenchant into them, that is still a good 900 gold even on the worst of the worst servers where they might go for 60 gold each. Or better yet, you can just turn them into weapon enchants that still seem to sell in the thousands. So in effect you are turning your timeless coins into runes that in turn become gold or items and then those items are turned into sha crystals and those sha crystals are turned into enchants and those enchants make you thousands. Short version, your timeless coins could turn into thousands of gold.

But wait, act now and you will be thrown into a raffle for even more. Well, not exactly. But there are four pets that drop in the ToT raid. All of them can be won off the original loot assignment and all of them can also be won from using a coin. Some of those pets even still sell for 30K plus.

One of those pets can only be attained from the LFR and once we level up we will never be able to get into the ToT LFR again so that means you will never be able to get that pet again which mean if you win it, put it in the bank, and sit on it for a while, it will be worth a mini fortune in years to come.

This time around you are turning your timeless coins into runes into pets and those pets sell nicely, look good in a collection, are some powerful buddies for battling, and have a future so bright they have to wear shades. Are you interested in running the ToT LFRs yet?

Well that is exactly what I have been doing with my timeless coins. Turning them in for free rolls and running the ToT LFRs for those extra rolls trying to get pets. Okay, still no luck for the grumpy one, but one day I will get them, and lets face it, doing the halls of flesh shaping and having it take only 20 minutes to full clear is a breath of fresh air after doing the SoO LFR. Seems, by the number of 200k+ players in ToT (7 including myself) when compared to SoO (1, just me) that the better players, and quicker more enjoyable runs are in ToT.

More enjoyable content, get rid of timeless coins, make gold and get pets. Yeah, running ToT to get rid of those timeless coins seems like the best option in game at the moment. Those timeless coins might seem useless, until you figure out how to use them. I am glad I figured out this way, it has been fun the last few weeks. Now if only that darn saurok would give me his pet.

See I don't really get how you can have coins, still need burdens for ring and say you'd rather sit on them and wait to get gear instead of trying to get whatever upgrade you can now. And then complain you have nothing to do with the coins.I recall this guy saying he's gold capped and has nothing to spend gold on it but also saying he doesn't want pets, he doesn't want mounts cause he only uses one anyway, he won't buy BoEs because he'll get gear from drops at one point and stuff like that. I can't not think that the reason these people have so much gold is exactly because they don't want to spend it and not because there's nothing to spend it on.

Being I clear at least 2 bosses each week that drop rings for me in flex and normal I would not waste my coins on getting a 535 ring with haste and crit to replace the 535 ring I did get with mastery and crit. Sure, it would be an increase, but it would also come with wasting another 500 valor to upgrade it for a total of a 170 DPS increase.

If I get the burden as a drop I will convert a ring because there is nothing else I can do with it. But for 170 DPS I am not going to waste coins on burdens when I can turn those coins into gold and wait for the 4 (or more) chances each week I have at getting a much better ring anyway.

I was not complaining I had nothing to do with them, I was explaining what you could do with them. Huge difference. I was also suggesting what I think would be a much better use of them, but sadly blizzard does not think about the big picture so they are closed off to any idea that might be deemed decent by the players, such as making burdens BoA like all the other gear on the island.

Well I thought maybe this would be a great idea, so last night, I grabbed myself 12 mogu runes on my tree, and went to heal ToT . Got pulled into Meg, which went fine. I was the only dispeller (not that I was the only who could dispell, I was just the only one doing it), so I just repeated several times during the fight that I wouldn't dispell people unless they left the group. And by the end people got the hang of it. we had 2 damage dealers doing over 100k, but still, Mageara went down. Then we got to the Birdie, and our tanks declared that this was just a simple tank and spank, so no one went to do nests. I thought maybe it had been nerfed more than I knew about, so I wasn't going to argue. I'm sure a decent group could cheese the mechanics there. But with only 2 dps over 100k, and several around 20k, we were not able to. Finally after four or five stacks of determination (and finding a few dps to do the nests with me) we got her down. Not as painful as it was when ToT lfr was first released, but still, it was pretty terrible.

So buy those, use them in ToT, and you are capping valor which you are most likely going to do anyway, and getting 7.5 rolls, which will surely be 2 or 3 pieces, instead of 1 you would get from buying one for 7500 coins.

All depends on if you are willing to run the ToT raids however. If you are not then your idea is not half bad at all.